111–120 of 620 posts
Goodbye dreams of owning an Nvidia GPU in 2022 - I ain't paying cutthroat prices on ebay/amazon. Guess we're buying Intel! Sidenote: Intel manufacturers their own stuff, and so is Apple right? Their new cool chips are all in-house or are they through TSMC?
30xx series Nvidia GPUs were manufactured on Samsung btw.
https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-40-series-gpu-arc...
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
I agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap…
Goodbye dreams of owning an Nvidia GPU in 2022 - I ain't paying cutthroat prices on ebay/amazon. Guess we're buying Intel! Sidenote: Intel manufacturers their own stuff, and so is Apple right? Their new cool chips are all in-house or are they through TSMC?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all in all, the GPU market is overall fairly tiny compared to TSMC's total output. From an economics perspective, it doesn’t really matter. The price of a market-rate good is the marginal price of producing one more unit. As long as cryptocurrency is financially incentivizing people to consume 100% of the marginal production, prices will continue to go up.…
GPU's are market-rate goods?
Designers are getting overwhelmed because they're having to redesign boards for components that are available, only to realize by the time they finish the changes, the part they redesigned for is also out of stock.
There's been some talk of a Chip-induced cold war, and I would say that's not crazy given the market conditions. I also love the guy who posts here all the time saying he works for the company that makes the machines that makes the chips and they can't make more machines because they don't have the chips that go in them. XD
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prices for used GPUs are also inflated, though I think they have started to come down a bit. Once Ethereum moves to proof-of-stake (early 2022?) the market will probably get flooded with used GPUs.
Miners will probably move to Ethereum classic.
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
well, frustrating maybe. But you know what, chips production is not like gravity, there are human controlling who gets what chip... Someone, somewhere could better arbitrate things...
And it's not the invisible hand which is, as often, well, invisible.
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
I agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap…
Looks like Argentina generates 131TWh annually as of 2016. The US was estimated to generate 4K TWh (a.k.a. 4PWh) in 2020.
"Argentina generates 131,910,280 MWh of electricity as of 2016 (covering 109% of its annual consumption needs)."
https://www.worldometers.info/electricity/argentina-electric...
Bitcoin energy usage is estimated at 100TWh annual, but the upper bound estimate is nearly 350TWh so it could be more than Argentina.
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
Honest question: is it possible to make a cryptocurrency that does not rely on some real-world scarce resource (e.g. chips, electricity, drive space)? This seems to be a cornerstone of what makes any crypto valuable in the first place (scarcity), and as long as that scarcity has real-world consequences, it seems like it would have the same result. Chia claimed to "Save the world from proof-of-work wastage", but it wo…
It's possible to imagine forms of economic waste that have different externalities, e.g. different environmental impacts.
But we don't have evidence yet (that I know of?) that introducing one decentralized currency reduces waste in another one -- if you did introduce a new currency that wasted economic value in a new way, there's no evidence that crypto as a whole would waste less of the existing things, it would just start wasting that thing too.
In this model crypto is like ... an emergent antipattern of networked civilization, where the network starts to waste every economic resource that it can "see" and provably waste.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in Taiwan) has really affected them, and various sources seem to confirm it, here's one : https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-shortage-taiwan-drought-... And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all in a…
> And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all in all, the GPU market is overall fairly tiny compared to TSMC's total output. From an economics perspective, it doesn’t really matter. The price of a market-rate good is the marginal price of producing one more unit. As long as cryptocurrency is financially incentivizing people to consume 100% of the marginal production, prices will continue to go up.…
Also, you can't simply choose another node last minute, your design is intimately linked to the PDK of the node. Porting to another node is far from trivial.